43% of workers would leave their company for a 10% salary increase, and weak company culture is to blame. Employees look beyond pay as a primary selling point, and many feel ready to change jobs at a moment’s notice. To retain the best team members, you need to empower your employees and maintain a healthy work environment. If want to shine bright on Glassdoor, focus on the following:
Prioritize Recognition
Recognition should be a core initiative, not just a sporadic event. Acknowledgment from peers and superiors can help strengthen your workplace culture and create a positive employee experience. 57% of employees say feeling appreciated is the aspect of workplace culture they crave most. Here are some tips on how to help you embed positive recognition into your company culture:
- Make it deliberate: Align employee recognition programs with your company’s values. Create a feedback mechanism enabling leaders to access employee accomplishments, and give on-the-spot recognition.
- Make it a priority: Enable publicly given credit among employees and consider scheduling meetings where the only agenda is recognition. Alternatively, carve out time before the weekend to congratulate employees who excelled that week, overcame an obstacle, or reached a milestone.
- Make it personal: Clearly express how an employee’s work impacted your company’s goals, values, and customers. To avoid generalization in your recognition program, hold discussions to understand the types of recognition and rewards employees want. Additionally, give a reward experience that reflects individual work and lifestyle preferences.
Emphasize Wellbeing
Ignoring employee wellness can hurt your company’s culture and affect productivity. Work-related stress costs US companies $30 billion a year in lost productivity. While wellness positively impacts work culture, companies must offer more than just Pilates and gluten-free snacks. Below are three strategies to help you build a company culture that takes employee wellbeing seriously:
- Holistic wellbeing programs: Your wellness programs should touch every aspect of employee wellbeing: emotional, social, physical, and financial. 65% of companies with strategic, holistic wellbeing programs see improvements in their company culture.
- Work-Life balance: Show employees you care about their wellbeing by supporting a healthy work-life balance. Offer flexible work opportunities such as adapted hours, remote working, and compressed workweeks. Note that your flexibility policy should be based on employees’ lifestyles and your organizational needs.
- Inclusive culture: Inclusive workplace culture plays a significant role in employee happiness. Build an inclusive culture by treating employees with respect, supporting both junior and senior employees to create a sense of belonging for all, and creating an environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas and being themselves.
Give them Wings
Make sure employees are presented with and knowledgeable of growth opportunities. A lack of advancement opportunity inhibits their engagement and retention, weakening your company culture. Providing meaningful opportunities doesn’t have to involve a pay raise. Consider using the following strategies to foster a sense of dynamic career growth:
- Introduce special projects: Invite employees to work on special projects that will help them improve their skills and interact with more co-workers.
- A seat at the table: Proactively ask employees for their opinions on important decisions. Give them the freedom to voice concerns openly and honestly through one-on-one feedback sessions with senior management or suggestion schemes. Show employees you take their opinions seriously by informing them about what you’ve learned and how you’ve responded.
- Networking: Provide opportunities for career advancement and growth through networking with cross-functional peers and support cross-departmental projects. Don’t play favorites; offer networking opportunities to all employees and hold company-sponsored networking events during work hours.
Encourage Success
You can’t develop a breakthrough product if your company culture scorns failure. When you foster a culture of success (while being tolerant of mistakes), employees are empowered to do great work and celebrate personal and shared victories. If your employees aren’t feeling successful at work, here are some steps you can take to shift into a winning culture:
- Show what success looks like: Show employees which behaviors or actions will lead to success by sharing accomplishments via company communications, team meetings, and social recognition tools. When announcing a particular achievement, discuss what the employee did to achieve their success and why it matters.
- Allow safe failure: Encourage employees to try new things and support failures that occur when they take calculated risks. Protect and respect those who fail, ensuring employees learn from mistakes.
- Conduct performance reviews: Help employees identify their successes through regular performance assessments. Reviews should highlight what employees are doing well, discuss opportunities for growth, and evaluate goals. To make performance reviews more effective, combine annual reviews with quarterly reviews, peer feedback, and regular one-on-one conversations.
Put Purpose Before Profit
Today’s workforce is increasingly purpose-driven, and employees are likely to stay with an organization that puts purpose before profit. 79% of adults would consider a company’s purpose before applying for a job. You need more than a few nice words on your website’s About section, however, to build a purposeful culture. Below are some tips to help you inject a culture of purpose into your company’s DNA:
- Communicate your purpose: Ensure employees know what your ideology is and understand how their responsibilities contribute to the bigger picture. Frequently discuss your company’s identity and set reminders at work. Bring out employees’ need for a sense of purpose by offering opportunities for volunteerism or community involvement. Ensure they understand how their efforts help make a difference.
- Tie your purpose to employee value proposition and customer value proposition: Harmonize your purpose with your employee value proposition, customer value proposition, and social good to create a sense of purpose. You can do this by articulating how your company impacts your employees, customers, and people all over the world.
- Link your recognition efforts to your purpose: Create a sense of ownership by connecting employee recognition to your company’s purpose. Publicly recognize employees that have demonstrated your corporate purpose and show how they’ve impacted customers with their work.
Never Take Your Eye Off Culture
Employees are your ultimate customers, and maintaining a strong company culture is the key to retaining excellent team members. While creating this culture doesn’t happen overnight, identify what you can improve by asking your employees what works and what doesn’t. View culture as a continuous effort and commit to creating one that leads with trustworthy management and a fair, inclusive environment for all.